Wonder is the concluding volume in Robert J. Sawyer’s ambitious trilogy about the emergence of an artificial intelligence on the World Wide Web. The first volume, Wake, detailed how the Internet provides the necessary underlying infrastructure and how China’s Great Firewall accidentally gives rise to consciousness among all the data.

Webmind, as he comes to call himself, is introduced to the physical world through the eyes of a once-blind 16-year-old girl whose experimental seeing-eye device allows her to see the actual data flow of the net, and Webmind to see through her physical eyes. As the first person to make contact, Caitlin takes on the role of educating Webmind until he can learn for himself. It doesn’t take long.

The second volume, Watch, turns its attention to the reaction of the U.S. government to this supposed threat to human sovereignty, and their attempts to destroy Webmind before we all become slaves to the machine.

After that fails, we come to Wonder. Now, Webmind takes the offensive, going public in a spectacular way by communicating with anyone who cares to ask a question, by providing the world with seemingly miraculous solutions to chronic problems (such as cancer and spam), and by addressing the United Nations. Along the way, Webmind develops a strong bond with Caitlin and her family, and repeatedly avows he will never use his powers for evil.

In all three volumes, the reader is regularly bombarded with information dumps to explain what’s going on, how it works and to lay the ground for upcoming plot developments. The books are essentially thrillers, and Sawyer is adept at keeping the plot racing, if not at keeping us guessing. It’s never a secret who will come out on top in the end. This difficulty is mitigated by our interest in Sawyer’s ideas, which are the result of years of research and interest in artificial intelligence.

Over the three books, the human subplot centres on Caitlin’s personal life, especially her emerging sexuality, which Sawyer often ties directly to larger ethical issues. In these scenes, the information dumped on us is moral, not technical. Unfortunately, Sawyer is much better with machines and ideas than with people. Just as with his technical theories, different values and objections are given pretty short shrift, so that these scenes always end with Sawyer’s opinions being proved right. Whether or not a middle-aged man writing from inside the head of a 16-year-old thinking about her breasts and having sex with her boyfriend is unseemly, I leave to the reader. But given the superficiality of the psychological dimension of the books, I cringed every time.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first two books, both of which were leaner and brisker than this one. And Wonder is still full of cool stuff for the geek set. But it also bears the burden of having to up the stakes for Webmind a third time, and of satisfactorily concluding a complicated plot. There are secret government agencies, anonymous independent hackers, school bullies, rogue military commanders, Chinese dissidents, portrait-painting apes and more. But there are two conspicuous absences. The first is real bad guys. Sawyer’s antagonists all, without exception, come to repent their ways and see the light.

The second is private enterprise. The duality in the trilogy is between large government — China’s, the United States’s, and the mass of humanity (and definitely not individuals). But large corporations simply don’t come into play. They’re mentioned, matter-of-factly, but only as things which have little impact. BlackBerrys play a role as a tool, but RIM apparently has no interest in this new factor of communications technology. Ditto Google, Microsoft, etc.

More disturbing is the overall thesis developed throughout the book. On Page 3, Caitlin declares, of the U.S. attempts to eradicate Webmind, “… my Big Brother can take their Big Brother.” The rest of the book is constructed to prove this. Halfway through, on Page 174, Caitlin’s mother actually lectures her on how Webmind’s constant surveillance of everything any person does or says is a good thing: “… the mere knowledge that someone knows who you are, that someone is watching you, is bound to have a positive effect …” Shades of Foucault’s Panopticon.

Somehow, Sawyer conflates in his mind the idea of constant surveillance with the idea of freedom. He doesn’t see a conflict here because he constantly affirms that Webmind will only do good. This is just what the Chinese Communist Party affirms of themselves — and they play a large role in the novel — but this irony is lost on Sawyer, who casts them as villains, mostly for enforcing their dominance. Yet Webmind does in fact use force, hiring armed thugs who leave behind bloodied crime scenes, and a lot of blackmail to manipulate world leaders and others to his will. After the fact, they all come to see his truth.

The essential flaw is Sawyer’s Pollyanna faith in the benefits of technology. Just as he ignores some of the most powerful organizations on Earth, he avoids considering any possible dangers. Likewise, key scenes that drive the plot are quickly resolved in Webmind’s favour by ignoring human psychology. People just don’t abandon their core beliefs without a fight, but the characters in Wonder do it every time, and then are grateful for having been corrected by a superior being.

Sawyer has real gifts as a writer, including an increasingly adept use of language, but here he turns them to something with an eerie resemblance to the rankest propaganda.

If you’ve followed Webmind’s story through the first two novels, you’ll probably want to find out what happens. But so many cardboard characters are manipulated so shamelessly to support Sawyer’s beliefs that I was disappointed.